This course will teach you the tools you'll need to understand the fundamentals of financial accounting. Concise videos, the financial records of a small business, and "your turn" activities guide you through the three most commonly used financial statements: the Balance Sheet, the Income Statement, and the Statement of Cash Flows. Beyond recording transactions, you'll learn how to prepare these financial statements, and read and analyze them to draw basic conclusions about a company's financial health.
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Use journal entries to record transactions
- Prepare and use t-accounts to summarize transactions recorded during an accounting period
- Describe the three most commonly used financial statements and how they fit together
- Prepare these financial statements based on transactions recorded during an accounting period
- Draw basic conclusions about a company's financial health

YY

This course gives me a practical understanding of accounting principles and key financial statements, which is helpful for my work. Strongly recommend to my friends and colleagues

LM

Apr 13, 2018

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

Really enjoyed the course - was really dreading learning about accounting but the instructor was able to break it down and make it both fun and interesting for me to learn!

From the lesson

More Transactions, Analysis of Financial Statements, and an Annual Report

During this last week, we’ll walk through the second year of operations for our fictional startup company, The Garden Spot (TGS Year 2), for additional practice recording transactions and preparing our end-of-period financial statements. Then, we’ll do some analysis of The Garden Spot’s financial statements. Finally, we’ll take a look at PepsiCo’s Annual Report as an example of reporting for a publicly traded U.S. company.

Taught By

Luann J. Lynch

Almand R. Coleman Professor of Business Administration

Transcript

The garden spot, year one case, offered the opportunity for a nice introduction into the basics of recording transactions, and preparing a simple income statement, and a simple balance sheet. We're going to turn it up a notch with the garden spot, year two case. It's more complicated, it's more challenging. I think you'll find it rewarding as well. The case is on the course site. So if you haven't read it, take a moment to do so, before going any further. This case is also a fictional case, in which Mary Jo has just completed her second year of operations of the Garden Spot. Several things happen during the year, that Mary Jo needed to account for. First, there were some transactions that were similar to those she had encountered in her first year of operations. Those should be things that would be straight forward for us. Some transactions were things that she had not encountered. But based on her knowledge of accounting, that she had developed from year 1, she could figure out how to handle those, and I think you can too. Then some transactions were things that Mary Jo had not encountered before, and she would probably need some help in how to record them. We'll work through those more slowly, as well. And then finally, she needs to prepare financial statements for the second year of operations. So we can take stock and see how she did.

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